By the time Tony co-founded Lonely Planet Publications in 1973, he already had the travel bug. And ever since, travel and discovery have been at the heart of his life and career.
I’ve recorded several podcasts, interviews, conversations recently.
At London Business School Maureen and I recorded Journeys, a conversation with Rajesh Chandy the Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Developing World at the Wheeler Institute. People seemed to enjoy it, someone suggested that we ‘looked like two teenagers our to start an exciting adventure,’ not business like at all.
With Tyrel Cameron Eskelson I talked on his Interlocutor podcast about my travel life, starting in Pakistan when I was a small child right up to travel in recent weeks and for the rest of 2025.
I had the pleasure on Tuesday night of launching the new Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist novel Two Steps Forward. In alternating chapter as Martin (recently divorced English engineer) and Zoe (recently widowed Californian artist) they set out to walk the Camino Santiago...
Two photos that show why North Korea isn’t going to be threatening anybody with nuclear missiles anytime soon. And one that shows why Kim Jong-Un is winning the insult battle. ▲ Check Orang Airport – 41°25'49.12"N – 129°38'45.95"E – on Google Earth. What are those ai...
Over 100,000 people have been evacuated from the danger zone around Bali’s threatening Gunung Agung, an active volcano that last erupted in 1963. That eruption killed 1500 people and you’ll still see the lava flows if you drive out to the eastern side of Bali. I climb...
The Australian daily email newsletter Crikey summed up the announcement that women would be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia fairly succinctly: The brutal theocratic regime of Saudi Arabia is suddenly everyone’s favourite fundamentalist gang of war criminals afte...
It’s a standard piece of political advice that you should never hold a referendum or any other vote you don’t need to if you don’t already know the result. That advice certainly held true with the Brexit vote, not only did the unexpected result end Prime Minister Davi...
Skift, the online travel newsletter, reported recently on one area where the USA enjoys a considerable trade advantage with China: far more Chinese travellers visit the USA than vice versa and that disparity is growing. Over the past decade US tourism to China has onl...
I was a fan for Soviet Bus Stops – a wonderful photographic book by Christopher Herwig – years before I crossed the border from China into Kazakhstan and entered the Soviet bus stop heartland. You can read a CNN article about the Canadian photographer’s crazy mission ...
The amazing Nancy Hatch Dupree died, aged 89, on September 10. There were fine obituaries for her in The Economist and The New York Times and many other places. I never met her, but I certainly knew her most famous book very well indeed: An Historical Guide to Afghani...
I’ve been hitting the galleries and museums in London and then in Melbourne the last few weeks. First of all at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Knightsbridge, London there was Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains. I was never a huge Pink Floyd fan and the only time...
I’ve posted on the weird and wonderful signs you encounter in China on previous trips and I certainly saw plenty on my recent Silk Road journey. ▲ Sometimes the signs were potentially very useful, but never seemed to appear at the right time. On more than one occas...
© Tony Wheeler’s Travels 2013